I first encountered the 1988 public opinion survey while reading Tessler’s “The origins of popular support for Islamist movements: A political economy analysis (1997)”(M. 1941.-. Tessler 1997) Later, I was able to find this dataset available on ICPSR, presented in Carnegie Middle East Governance and Islam Dataset, 1988-2014 (ICPSR 32302)(M. Tessler 2016) This dataset is an effort to gather surveys across the period, reorganize and harmonize the survey items into variables that allow for analysis over time. Therefore, some of survey items that Tessler used in his analysis cannot be found in the dataset, and the codebook contains limited descriptions for the 1988 survey.
As I went on to seek for further details about the 1988 survey, I came across Tessler and Grobschmidt’s study “Democracy in the Arab world and the Arab-Israeli conflict (1995)”.(Garnham and Tessler 1995, Mark Tessler, and Marilyn Grobschmidt. “Democracy in the Arab world and the Arab-Israeli conflict.” pp. 135-169) This earlier analysis led me to learn that the 1988 survey originally included 293 Palestinians residing in Kuwait, while the ICPSR dataset only contains the 292 Egyptian respondents and the 300 Kuwaiti respondents.
That is, although the dataset I have acquired is already fruitful, yet, relying on it alone would not allow me to replicate many analyses that were done right after 1988. And I could not convince myself not to think about why there were originally three samples originally yet I am now using only two of them because of accessibility.
Therefore, I reached out first to ICPSR. They looked over the version history and did not find any records about the 1988 Palestinian sample nor the original survey instrument. Thus, they kindly contacted Professor Tessler on my behalf. The good new today is that I received professor Tessler’s reply. In the mean time, I truly look forward to learn more about what happened with the Palestinian sample and anticipate the chance of access to the original dataset.
